Death of a whistleblower: Former fellow agent calls for independent investigation

A former U.S. government intelligence analyst and investigator is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate the death of former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Philip Haney.

According to law enforcement authorities, Haney, 66, was found dead on Feb. 21 about 40 miles east of Sacramento, California.

Several reports cited friends of Philip Haney as saying they found it difficult to believe that he had taken his own life.

Initial reports said that Haney had taken his own life, but the Amador County Sheriff’s Office on Monday said that had not been conclusively determined.

Haney was an Obama-era whistleblower who had said that “one or more” terror attacks in the U.S. could have been prevented if not for the Obama administration’s prioritizing political correctness over safety

“The investigation of Phil’s death continues, and I hope that Attorney General William Barr constitutes a team of special investigators from the federal law enforcement bureaucracy under his command to conduct an exhaustive, independent investigation of the circumstances of Phil’s death, given that Phil had exposed enormous treachery by the Obama administration to cripple our nation’s counterterrorism efforts,” intelligence analyst and investigator William Marshall noted in a Feb. 26 op-ed for Townhall.

Marshall said he was not questioning “the competence of the Amador County, California sheriff’s office,” but noted that Haney “had earned the wrath of both the Deep State and Islamists across this country with the revelations about how his work in identifying Islamic terrorists had been obliterated on the orders of the Obama administration. As one of the founders of the Department of Homeland Security, and as a brilliant officer and analyst at the Customs and Border Protection service, Phil was credited with identifying 300 terror suspects.”

Of the initial report that Haney’s gunshot wound to the chest was self-inflicted, Marshall wrote: “I’m sorry, but I do not buy for a minute that this most rational of men, who had weathered nine investigations over many years by the Obama administration into his conduct after he challenged its Islamist-loving policies and come out perfectly clean every time, would ever do something so irrational as to take his own life. Philip Haney was the embodiment of logic and resilience. I could only hope to have a fraction of the fortitude he demonstrated if similarly confronted. He was not a quitter. Ever.”

Marshall continued: “Phil’s incredible abilities at suspect interrogation, document exploitation and pattern recognition analysis had made him an indispensable intelligence expert working on countering the threat to our homeland from political and militant Islam. His knowledge of both the practice and history of Islam was encyclopedic. Yet the reward for his service was to have the Obama administration order him in 2009 to delete 850 pages of database records about potential Islamic terrorists that he had spent many years developing in what Phil referred to as ‘the First Great Purge.’ ”

The “Second Great Purge,” as Haney termed it, occurred in 2011, “as the Obama administration started identifying and targeting for removal key subject matter experts on domestic militant Islam across the federal bureaucracy,” Marshall wrote. “Phil himself became the target of investigations by three separate federal agencies. Other subject matter experts, like Steve Coughlin, John Guandolo, Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley and other patriots who understood the threat of militant Islam to the United States and would have vociferously objected to the Obama administration’s next move were similarly targeted and driven out of government. That next move was the administration’s embrace of a perverse policy agenda which it termed ‘Countering Violent Extremism,’ or CVE.”

CVE “fundamentally altered the U.S. Government’s treatment and view of political and militant Islam,” Marshall noted. “It went from treating its proponents as a threat needing to be countered with all the tools of law enforcement, to treating its adherents as people needing to be ‘understood,’ partnered with and coddled by our government, in hopes of reforming their psychopathic tendencies. In foreign countries, which had embraced a similar philosophy, this policy is known as ‘Engagement and Dialogue.’ It proved disastrous.”

Haney had “persuasively argued that the CVE policies that the Obama administration pursued, including the destruction of Phil’s work that was ordered to be deleted, led to the government’s failure to stop the Islamist attacks in December 2015 on a San Bernardino Christmas party and in June 2016 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando,” Marshall wrote. “Simply put, as Phil frames it, the Obama administration ordered Phil to erase the dots that should have been used to connect these individuals and their organizations, particularly one called Tablighi Jamaat, as part of the Obama administration’s effort to sanitize the background of U.S. Islamists with whom it wanted to engage in its perverse terrorist-coddling policies.”

In reiterating that the theory that Haney took his own life “does not compute with the man I and many other conservative allies knew,” Marshall added that Haney “was deeply religious. He told me he hoped to be brought back into the government by the Trump administration, perhaps to train CBP officers. I told him that he should be brought back to run CBP and restructure our counterterrorism policies.”

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